We’ll evolve from Themepark to Sandbox, to something else entirely someday. Payment models will change depending on the flavor of the month and trends. But MMOs can never die.

We’ve tasted glory, and we’ll have even more of it someday.

As to melponeme_k’s assertion, I obviously can’t speak for all devs. But, I think there are broadly two schools of thought.

1. Conflict creates drama. This is the EVE Online philosophy, where allowing people to give into their baser natures makes for great stories. This path also embraces the “any publicity is good publicity” angle. I mean, where else can you hear about someone screwing over former friends to take a huge prize and have people think, “That sounds fascinating!” Closest you get is fiction, but EVE Online scams happen to real people.

There’s also an element of “if you can’t beat them, join them” in this attitude. If griefers gonna grief, then you accept it as part of the game. Even in a relatively “safe” game like WoW, the griefer can add a bit of spice to an otherwise uneventful game.

2. Code can’t determine intent. Look at the history of PvP to see how easily people can exploit a system. As you pile up more restrictions, you usually add in more loopholes to abuse. Blue healers in UO (or angeled healers in M59), for example, or noto PKers. The flagging system was put in place to discourage random PKing, but it just made it so that people who ran afoul of the rules for standing up for what they thought was right just ended up putting a target on themselves.

We forget that the “need/greed” roll was put in place to stop “ninja looters” from long ago. Now we see people abusing that system to try to loot anything and everything, ignoring what need/greed means. (I remember back in Vanilla WoW that raid leaders would often require everyone to pass on items then manually do a roll. No such mechanics in LFD.) But, addinng restrictions to who can roll can edge out people who have legitimate reasons for rolling on strange items. I remember, again, in vanilla that people would scream at me for rolling on Rogue stuff as a Druid, even though my main spec was Feral, and Dex was the stat I needed for that.

Any tool you give players to stop griefers can be used by griefers to harass players. Any tool you put in place to stop anti-social activity will also likely stop some forms of social activity, such as letting people shun assholes in the game.

I mostly subscribe to the second philosophy, myself. As I tried to run a PvP game for the better part of a decade, I saw first-hand how even as you start to understand the second- and third-order effects of your design decisions, you still see people exploiting the hell out of whatever you put in place. Not to say that you give up, but it took me a long time to get to the point I am today, able to identify some of the possible exploit-prone mechanics in a game.

In the glory days of UO and EQ, how many worldwide MMO players were there? About 300 000?

The genre’s never been healthier. Personally I’ve never had more MMOs backlogged up that I don’t have time to play because I’m having too much fun playing a different MMO.

But Spinks, time after time in game after game we get game play that consistently allows for the worst possible behavior in players. Once or twice or maybe three times a mistake in game development is understandable. But now it is an ongoing practice which means the developers themselves have issues in certain areas which they won’t address.

@Redbeard
“it’s the people whose concept of fun is to ruin other people’s WoW time.”

I will agree that since WOW is so popular it is more inviting for griefers than other mmorpgs. And yet the developers won’t take this into account when they design their game. In fact they go out of their way to cater to these people and other outlier groups (such as raging raiders). As I said beforehand a few mistakes is understandable but when it is consistent it isn’t. And the only ones who can consistently take the blame are the developers.

Some of them started out as griefers themselves. You can see it in the names they pick to represent themselves.